Automatically invite new distribution list member to older appointments

[arne309]

Hello everyone,

I am sorry if this has been covered before, but I didn't find anything to help my problem:

We set up ZCS (open source) and wrote a small script to automatically create user accounts for our users if they want to using their existing credentials. All users are added to a distribution group. However, users that are new to the distribution group, won't see appointments, that the distribution group has been invited to before. This is a major issue for us since as a student council we frequently get new users and all users need to see the appointments. Is there a way to fix that?

Thanks for your help!
Arne

[odeleon]

Do you need to have the appointments/event in each user's calendar? ... If you don't then there's a simple workaround for this: Share the calendar.

Every event that would involve every user in your mail system that you don't need them to accept the invitation can be created in this calendar and it is shared with the distribution list.

In the admin console there's a checkbox that says "Notify new members of available shares" so new members would get access to this calendar automatically.

Now that I think about it, another way to do this, and to have the events created in each user's calendar could be to send them an email with and .ics file attached and have the relevant events in there. This functionality was introduced in 6.0.6 (see bugs 27959 and 17768). You can either send the new user the message or directly add it into their account using zmmailbox, whichever you prefer. Though I think this won't help if you need them to accept the invitations, RSVP or confirm attendance.... don't know if you need that.

Hope this helps.

[arne309]

Hey,

thanks for your help. Is there a way I can make the users auto-accept the Share via a zmprov-command or a setting or something else?

Arne

[odeleon]

Yes, there is!

You'll have to use zmmailbox for this. It would be something like:

zmmailbox -z -m new_user@example.com cm -V appointment /shared_cal_name source@example.com mount_name

To explain this a bit. You're creating a mountpoint (cm) called mount_name for new_user@example.com with an appointment type view which comes from source@example.com's /shared_cal_name . You should run this as zimbra user preferably on your mailstore server (I think). Hope that makes sense

Further reading: Zmmailbox - Zimbra :: Wiki

[ewilen]

I'd also look at these bugs:

Bug 28348 - Be more selective in addition of appointments from incoming messages See comment 1; the second & third keys correspond to preferences that can be set in the admin control panel (Preferences > Calendar Options).

One idea would be to just re-send (or re-forward) the invite to the distro list. This shouldn't affect the people who already have it, but it should get it to the people who don't. Watch out for possible complications if people are using external clients (iCal, Lightning, Outlook, etc.), as they don't always handle invitations sent to a distro list the way you'd like.

Bug 19458 - Meetings should be aligned with the distribution lists at all times is the bug that would really address the need expressed in the original post.